No recommendations, as I find the sort of hyper command and control simulation games not my cup of tea, but as someone noted the Scourge of War stuff might be up your ally.
I agree that pure random activation is a better tool for higher levels of abstraction. As far as us having better ways of doing things, especially on computers, that may well be so, but I haven’t seen that many of them that I can recall. The problem is always the same as it has ever been–complexity doesn’t equal realism, and realism doesn’t equal fun. Finding that sweet spot is tough. If you do a realistic simulation of the frustrations of command, the gamer just gets frustrated; he or she doesn’t have the same pressures or need to get the job done, but is trying to have fun, and fun for most grogs means control, not lack thereof. Yet as we all realize, too, if you abstract stuff too much, there’s the danger of losing a lot of historical flavor and creating a situation that doesn’t resonate with the gamer’s understanding of what’s being simulated.
I grew up on board games in the era when they went from “here’s a counter with two numbers, combat and movement, with a simple odds combat table” to “here’s a counter with six or more numbers and symbols, and a whole page full of combat charts.” As a young gameer, I believed more was better; why have combat and movement when you can have attack, defense and movement values? Hell, why not range? Penetration? Games like AH’s Tobruk, where you spent more time figuring out the arcana of how much armor a British 2lb AT shell could penetrate than you did actually thinking about the flow of the battle were the result, followed eventually by things running the gamut from Campaign for North Africa to Advanced Squad Leader to everything in between. More data, more charts, more everything.
But all of this did not necessarily result in more entertaining activities for the gamer, nor did it really result in more realistic simulations, because warfare is ultimately about people, and people are damn hard to model.
Nowadays, I tend to gravitate towards more rather than less abstraction, though I do enjoy some detailed analysis stuff. But I like to focus on the decisions leaders might make, rather than micromanaging the minutia. I have never grasped the appeal of the Norm Koger/Gary Grigsby approach, though I have played many of their games. The idea that there is inherent value in modeling every rifle or machine gun in a division and adding up values to give the player a raft of data seems bizarre to me. I can imagine Manstein, say, or Bradley worrying about how may jeeps a division has or how many light machine guns are available…